Reflectii

​Carlos Garrido’s book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism is undoubtedly an essential reading for any revolutionary American Marxist who is serious about building socialism. It is an open secret, and an embarrassment, among leftists in the west that they are politically impotent. Despite the fact that an increasing number of millennials and generation z’s in the United States have a positive attitude towards socialism and Marxism, Marxists remain relatively impotent. Notwithstanding the rising popularity of Marxism, this popularity has not, as of yet anyway, transitioned into political action with significant impact on the world. Garrido, like any good Marxist, believes that one of the key contributing factors to the impotence of our socialist movement is due to our lack of understanding what Marxism really means.

Global Equality and Its Discontents

We live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told. Across the globe, but especially in the wealthy economies of the West, the gap between the rich and the rest has widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety, stoking resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from the rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the recent protests of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest rates of income inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics.

Taqiyya is an Islamic doctrine that allows Muslims to deceive non-Muslims. As in lie to them. Dr. Sami Mukaram, author of Taqiyya in Islam, writes: “Taqiyya is of fundamental importance in Islam. Practically every Islamic sect agrees to it and practices it… Taqiyya is very prevalent in Islamic politics, especially in the modern era.” (Specific references to taqiyya in the Quran, the Hadith, and in Islamic law, can be found here.)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) is an “implacable” enemy of Daesh and it continues to act against the group.

Speaking in a press conference with his Saudi counterpart in Riyadh, Blinken said that the US will prevent a resurgence of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan.

The Guantanamo Bay military prison or detention center is an integral part of the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The USA has had a naval base on the modern communist island since 1903, and it is the oldest American naval base abroad. Cuban authorities consider the Guantanamo base a classic relic of colonial history, and the socialist government in Havana has never recognized the agreements that led to the establishment of the naval-military base. The Cubans are right because the military base and prison (camp) there are relics of colonialism that remain in operation to this day like Guam, American Samoa, Malvinas, French Guiana.

Official allowances paid to paramilitaries involved in wartime crimes in Bosnia showed that Serbian State Security Service chiefs Jovica Stanisic and Franko Simatovic were responsible for killings and expulsions, the UN court established this week.

The nature and ideology of the chief, as well as the situation he is in, command hardening. Moreover, it will now be based on the most right-wing parliament in the history of the republic. It’s hard not to open the “Gates of Hell” all the way. One thing is certain: Our work begins now.

The press of the whole world has reverberated with the news: Romania, after persistently saying that it had incurred no personal responsibility in what is conventionally called “the extermination of the Jews” (or “the Holocaust” or “the Shoah”), has at last seen the error of its ways and is set to do penance. In France, Le Monde recently bore the headline, “Romania formally acknowledges its participation in the extermination of the Jews” (article by Mirel Bran, 17 November 2004, p. 7).

In Memoriam

La coutume voudrait qu’en tête de ces Écrits révisionnistes je remercie tous ceux, sans distinction, qui me sont venus en aide dans mes recherches ou dans la réalisation de l’ouvrage.

Salman Rushdie once commented that those who are displaced by war are the shining shards that reflect the truth. With so many people fleeing wars and ecological collapse in our world today, and more to come, we need acute truth-telling to deepen our understanding and recognize the terrible faults of those who have caused so much suffering in our world today. In The Mercenary, Jeffrey Stern has accomplished a tremendous feat inasmuch as every paragraph aims to tell the truth.